Chapter : 933
But as Jager had demonstrated, a cornered predator is often the most dangerous. Seeing his situation was hopeless, Kael made a desperate gamble. Instead of trying to fight the Sandworm, he turned his attention back to its master. With a furious buzz, he launched himself not at the monster, but directly at Habiba. He was banking on the fact that she would be forced to recall her spirit to defend herself, giving him the opening he needed to escape.
It was a suicidal, but brilliant, move. Habiba’s face, which had been a mask of serene focus, flickered with a fractional moment of surprise. Her connection to her spirit was absolute, but the creature was too massive, too slow to intercept this sudden, point-blank charge.
But Habiba was the Sand Heroine for a reason. She did not panic. She did not retreat. She stood her ground, her hand moving to the hilt of the curved scimitar at her side. As Kael descended upon her, a living missile of venom and hate, she did something that defied all logic. She closed her eyes.
Inside the carriage, Lloyd saw it all. He saw Ken being slowly bled dry. He saw Habiba about to be impaled. He saw the two separate duels reaching their catastrophic, simultaneous climaxes. The time for observation was over.
His decision was instantaneous. He could intervene in both fights, splitting his power. But that would be inefficient. The Major General’s mind saw a cleaner, more decisive solution. Eliminate the true threat. The brain of the operation.
"Amina," he said, his voice a low, calm command. "Stay in the carriage. Do not, under any circumstances, get out."
Lloyd, however, did not draw a sword. He did not charge. He simply stood beside the carriage, a quiet, unassuming figure, and he raised a hand.
And all hell broke loose.
To his right, the very air seemed to tear apart, a swirling vortex of shadow and incandescent crimson light. From that vortex, a nine-foot-tall demon of solidified flame and cooled magma stepped forth, its obsidian armor pulsing like a volcanic heart. In its hands, it held a twelve-foot-long zanbatō, wreathed in a roaring, all-consuming wildfire. The spiritual pressure that erupted from Iffrit was a physical, concussive force, a wave of pure, elemental annihilation that made the ground tremble.
To his left, a different, but no less terrifying, miracle occurred. A goddess of the storm, wreathed in a blinding inferno of azure plasma, materialized from the rain-soaked air. Her silver hair crackled with contained lightning, her golden eyes were incandescent suns of rage, and the very atmosphere around Fang Fairy hummed with the high-frequency shriek of a thousand captured thunderstorms.
Jager, who was locked in his desperate dance with Ken, saw the movement out of the corner of his eye. A new variable. The target himself. A slow, arrogant smile spread across his face. The little lord had decided to play hero. This was perfect. The final piece of his masterpiece was stepping onto the stage of its own accord.
He was so focused on Lloyd’s appearance, so consumed by his own arrogant narrative, that he failed to notice the subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the air around him. The change was not in the spiritual pressure, but in the very fabric of reality itself.
Lloyd, standing calmly amidst the chaos, simply raised a hand. His sclera, the whites of his eyes, flashed pitch black for a single, unholy instant. An invisible, metaphysical seal, the power of his Austin bloodline, settled not on Jager, not on Kael, not on their spirits, but on the single, most critical component of Jager’s entire strategy.
It settled on the spiritual connection between Kroth and Ken.
The parasitic siphon, the soul-draining bite, was instantly, cleanly, and absolutely severed.
Ken felt the drain stop. He felt his full, untamed power come roaring back into his core. He looked up, his crimson eyes locking with Jager’s. And for the first time in the fight, the Demon Lord of Ferrum smiled. It was a terrible, beautiful, and utterly final smile. Jager’s victorious grin froze on his face, replaced by the dawning, horrified understanding that he had just made a catastrophic, and fatal, miscalculation.
The severing of the spiritual link was not a violent explosion; it was a profound and terrifying silence. For Jager, it felt as if a vital symphony had been cut off mid-crescendo. The exhilarating sensation of siphoning a King-Level being’s power, the intoxicating flood of raw energy that had been feeding his spirit and his own ego, vanished in an instant. One moment, he was the master puppeteer, slowly bleeding a god dry. The next, the strings in his hands had turned to dust.
Chapter : 934
His mind, a finely tuned engine of arrogance and strategy, could not process the event. It was an impossibility. A spiritual binding of that nature, once established between two King-Level entities, was an absolute. It could not be interfered with by a lesser power. Yet, it had been. Not weakened, not disrupted, but surgically, completely, and silently erased.
His gaze snapped to Lloyd, the insignificant nobleman who had just stepped out of the carriage. The boy was just standing there, his hands empty, his posture relaxed. There had been no grand incantation, no surge of power, no telltale glow of a high-level artifact. The impossible had happened with a quiet, contemptuous ease that was more terrifying than any overt display of force.
It was in this fractional moment of Jager’s stunned incomprehension that Ken Park acted. Freed from the parasitic drain, his full, unbridled power came crashing back into his being like a tidal wave. The smoldering embers of his rage, which had been banked by the spiritual drain, now roared into a consuming inferno. His triumphant, terrible smile widened, and he lunged.
This was not the calculated, probing attack from before. This was an execution. He moved with a speed that seemed to tear the very air apart, his crimson-armored form a blur of pure, kinetic purpose. Jager, his mind still reeling from the impossible, could not react in time. Ken’s fist, now glowing with the white-hot intensity of his fully unleashed core, slammed into the iron alligator’s head.
The sound was not a crack, but a deafening, wet implosion. The alligator spirit’s impenetrable, King-Rank scales, which had shrugged off blows that could level a castle, shattered like cheap pottery. Its massive skull collapsed inward, and the twenty-foot-long monstrosity was thrown backward, its body skidding across the muddy clearing before dissolving into a cloud of black, corrupted smoke. The spirit had been, in a single, devastating blow, vanquished.
The psychic backlash hit Jager like a physical hammer. He screamed, a raw, agonized sound, as he was thrown to his knees, blood pouring from his nose and ears. His connection to his spirit had been so violently severed that his own spiritual core had fractured. He was broken, defeated, and utterly at the mercy of the Demon Lord who now stood over him.
Simultaneously, the second duel reached its own climax. Habiba, her eyes closed, had entered a state of perfect, serene focus. As Kael’s venomous lance descended, she did not summon a shield of sand. She did something far more profound. She became the sand. With a subtle flex of her will, the very ground beneath her feet rose up, not as a wall, but as a living extension of her own body. A massive, perfectly formed hand of compressed, hardened sandstone erupted from the earth and simply… caught him.
Kael’s unstoppable charge ended in a jarring, ignominious halt, his body trapped in the unyielding grip of the stone hand. He was held fast, a furious, buzzing insect caught in a fossil. Before he could struggle, Habiba opened her eyes, and the hand began to squeeze.
It was in this moment of absolute, triumphant victory for the guardians that Jager, clutching his head and spitting blood, made his final, desperate move. He was defeated, but he was not out of the game. He saw his own death in Ken’s burning eyes, saw his partner’s imminent demise, and he made the cold, tactical decision to burn the entire chessboard.
"Kael!" he shrieked, his voice raw with pain and fury. "Now!"
It was a pre-arranged command, a failsafe for a scenario of catastrophic failure. Kael, understanding instantly, stopped struggling. A look of grim, fanatical resolve crossed his insectoid face. With a final, defiant roar, both assassins did the unthinkable.
They unsummoned their spirits.
In the same instant, Jager, with his one good hand, reached into his tunic and pulled out a shard of pulsating, black obsidian. It was not a weapon; it was a key. It was a focal point for a forbidden, world-altering ritual. He crushed it in his palm, the sharp edges digging into his flesh, and chanted a single, foul, guttural word of power, a word that was an insult to the very laws of reality.
Reality screamed in response.
A dome of shimmering, sickly purple energy erupted from Jager’s body. It expanded with impossible speed, a wave of pure, anti-magic energy. It was the ultimate trap. The forbidden magic. The Soul Catcher.